Content sharing services serve content, such as pictures, videos, text, or combinations thereof, to visitors who access the content sharing service. The content may be sourced from a publisher, automatically generated, or uploaded by one of the visitors to the content sharing service. The content may be represented as digitally encoded information. The content sharing service may store the content, or link to other services and subsequently retrieve the content prior to serving the content to the visitors.
The visitor may employ various techniques to access the content. For example, the visitor may access the content sharing service through a browser. In another example, the visitor may access the content sharing service via an application installed on a mobile device. The visitor may use any sort of device enabled to interact with the content sharing service, such as a personal computer, mobile phone, or an Internet enabled television, for example.
In certain instances, the content sharing service may serve content to be downloaded via the visitor's device, which may subsequently be stored and consumed by the visitor. In those cases, the content sharing service may intend that the visitor be the sole consumer of the content. In these cases, the content sharing service may be incentivized to ensure that the visitor does not make any unauthorized duplicates of the content, which may be subsequently copied and redistributed.
Various techniques may be employed to ensure that the visitor does not duplicate the content. The content may be distributed with a digital signature, with the digital signature ensuring that the content is only served via the visitor's device. In this case, the visitor may still find a way to re-record the content when it is being served (i.e. via a third-party application that records the raw data of the content presentation). Thus, efforts to protect the content via this technique may be frustrated.
In another case, the visitor may be dis-incentivized to re-distribute content by hiding a record associated with the visitor in the content through watermarking. In certain cases, the content may be re-encoded, and a watermark may be added to the content identifying the visitor. A watermark is a hidden digital object not visible via video or audio that indicates information about the content. Thus, if a visitor is served content, and subsequently redistributes the content, the redistributed content will indicate which visitor the content was initially distributed to. However, in implementing this technique, a large amount of processing power and time may be required re-encode every content item per visitor.